Memory Stick

By Oliver Milner

Crafty, cunning and certainly clever, Memory Stick is a firework display of different literary styles and genres. Crammed with detail and facts. Just like a memory stick.
Book club readers have described this first volume of Oliver Milner’s entertaining autobiography as “William Boyd and Bill Bryson meet James Herriot and Sue Townsend.”
Structurally Memory Stick is based around 134 footnotes, taken from opensource Wiki history references, between 1961 and 1987. The story starts in wet and windy North Yorkshire. Flies to Nigeria. Flies back again. Goes back to Nigeria. Flies back again. Neil Armstrong lands on the moon. Olly goes to Wales. Takes in Norwich, ends up in London. Tames a penguin, and then…?
Just download Memory Stick, it gets rather interesting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398427020

Oliver Milner

Oliver Milner is a pseudonym. Memory Stick is typical of the type of conversations we’ve all had about ourselves at some time or other, “Some of the facts may be distorted by time,” as Laurie Lee once wrote sagaciously. The author was born in Yorkshire, but grew up in post Biafran War Nigeria and boarding schools in England. His career started at the Financial Times but not too soon after he lost his Territorial Army commission in the Intelligence Corps, uncovered a spy, met Madonna, Mad Dog Adair, various Prime Ministers, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and an X-rated film director. Today he lives near Epping Forest, in the UK. He is married and has two grown up daughters, a tortoise, a Labradoodle, two cats and some sickly-looking runner beans.

Book preview

About the Author

Oliver Milner is a pseudonym. Memory Stick is typical of the type of conversations we’ve all had about ourselves at some time or other, Some of the facts may be distorted by time, as Laurie Lee once wrote sagaciously.

The author was born in Yorkshire, but grew up in post Biafran War Nigeria and boarding schools in England.

His career started at the Financial Times but not too soon after he lost his Territorial Army commission in the Intelligence Corps, uncovered a spy, met Madonna, Mad Dog Adair, various Prime Ministers, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and an X-rated film director.

Today he lives near Epping Forest, in the UK. He is married and has two grown up daughters, a tortoise, a Labradoodle, two cats and some sickly-looking runner beans.

Dedication

To my (as yet unborn) grandchildren. We may never meet. But at least you’ll have an idea of who (I thought) I was. And so, in part, where you’re from. With all

my love.

Copyright Information ©

Oliver Milner 2022

The right of Oliver Milner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398427013 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398427020 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

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E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the Covid-19 outbreak for giving me the focus and drive to do something whilst on furlough in 2020. This book, after all, has taken 30 years to create, but 30 days to write. Actually, the amazing free resource – Wiki History, provided all the footnotes, proving, as if any proof was needed, that everyone has a Memory Stick inside them. Thank you to the warriors on the internet for providing such a resource.

Thank you to the many driving forces behind this book, but in particular a clutch of particularly inspirational teachers, Sheffield Exham, Roger Beaufoy, Val Hague and Peter Heywood. If this is any good, it is largely down to them.

Finally, and above, all to my family who appear anonymised across these pages. Haven’t you suffered enough?

1961, London. Harrogate,

North Yorkshire, England

Sunday, January 1, Well Hello, At Last

I’ve always thought all of us born in a strobogrammatic year should stick together. As MAD Magazine pointed out on its cover for the March 1961 issue, this was the first upside-up year – i.e., one in which the numerals that form the year look the same as when the numerals are rotated upside down, a strobogrammatic number – since 1881. The next such year will be 6009.

I appreciate the likelihood of my meeting someone born in the next anniversary of a strobogrammatic year is…slim, but for this fact, I am indebted to Wikipedia. Most of the footnotes and links owe their origin to the free, extraordinary, online encyclopaedia. Which I always used to think must be infinite. Until you start writing a history of oneself, and then you realise, uh oh, what to include and what to exclude?

I might be here all day. Hopefully, so might you reading this. Or in the case of my wife and daughter who read faster than Concorde see p. 166, then the next hour and a half.

So, what happened next?

1961 (MCMLXI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1961st year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 961st year of the 2nd millennium, the 61st year of the twentieth century, and the 2nd year of the 1960s decade.

The year doesn’t start well.¹

Wednesday, January 4, Nuclear Cats

Erwin Schrödinger, he of the famous cat, the Austrian physicist and Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1887), dies. But has he really? Schrödinger theorised that if you placed a cat, a flask of poison and a radioactive source in a sealed box, and if using a Geiger counter once the flask of poison was released killing the cat, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other. Clearly.

As if impossibly complex theories weren’t enough in the physical world, atomic bombs nearly went off. By mistake…

Friday, January 20, JFK, 101

John F. Kennedy is sworn in as the 35th president of the USA. Four days later, a B-52 Stratofortress, with two nuclear bombs, crashes near Goldsboro, North Carolina.

More interesting for younger people, Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians is released in cinemas five days later. So, bearing in mind, I found 101 absolutely terrifying when I saw it 10 years later, the old film’s fared pretty well.

That’s the beauty of cartoon villains; they age very slowly.

Television loomed large too in the early 1960s. There wasn’t much else to do except sit in front of the box. Most households had a TV set, although the world was broadcast to us in black and white. When eventually colour was discovered to exist, we turned our back on such alchemy. It took a while to appreciate that cartoons might not be better in grey.

One of my favourite programmes – when I was old enough to be propped up and deposited in front of the TV – was Pogles’ Wood.

The Pogles were tiny magical beings who lived in a hollow tree in a wood. The four principals were Mr and Mrs Pogle, their adopted son Pippin, and a squirrel-like creature named Tog, who was Pippin’s playmate.

Obviously, I was Tog. The initial episode only had a single showing. The story centred on a dark and evil old shape-changing witch.

The overall tone was so sinister and disturbing the BBC declared it too frightening for its proposed inclusion in Watch with Mother,² which had a very young audience, and all future episodes revolve around more everyday countryside matters.

I thought Andy Pandy was rubbish. I also hated Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men – flob a dob – but I loved the Wooden Tops. Later that was followed by Trumpton.

Later still, I wanted to breathe for extended periods underwater with the use of oxygum, with my TV best friend Marine Boy. He had jet boots that propelled him underwater and an electric boomerang. But the best part – the childhood secret of every child born in the 1960s, the grownups don’t seem to have noticed – his mermaid girlfriend Neptima, was topless (although her hair always covered her breasts.)

What a show.

No disrespect to my mother either, but the person I most wanted to be tucked up into bed by was Blue Peter’s Valerie Singleton. She could make anything, so long as she never said the word Sellotape live on air, all was well with the world.

Sticky backed plastic held our world together.

Thursday, February 9, FAB 4

The Beatles perform for the first time at The Cavern Club. For all the fuss, the Fab Four formulate, I much prefer Prince³, however, the Beatles’ impact on social history is so profound they’ll make several appearances later on.

Even Prince’s girlfriend appears later too (see p. 197).

Monday, March 6, Turned out Nice Again

Bad start to the week: sadly it didn’t turn out nice again today, for him; George Formby, British singer, comedian and actor (b. 1904), dies. One of the first singles I later bought was When I’m Cleaning Windows. From memory, the B-side was Mr Wu’s a Window Cleaner Now.

Today, it’s hard to see why the BBC banned him for gentle innuendo.

Three cheers to the Wigan Ukulele Society for keeping it up. And his memory alive.

Sunday, April 9, Zog

King Zog I of Albania (b. 1895) dies. He was also the 11th prime minister of Albania, and its 7th president. Clearly, a busy man.

Who knew there was a King Zog?

Wednesday, April 12, Hero #1

No respecter of the passing of King Zog, the USSR celebrates an event to which world history owes it a whole page.

Taking off in Vostok 1, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space, orbiting the Earth once before parachuting to the ground.

Monday, April 17, Pigs, Invade

The Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba begins; it fails by April 19.

The day after Fidel Castro announces that the Bay of Pigs Invasion has been defeated. Classic.

Well done, America!

Monday, May 5, Hero #2

Not to be outdone by the USSR, the American’s space programme finally makes headlines: total legend Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space, aboard Mercury-Redstone 3.

Well done, America, but you were second. The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell, as Andrew Carnegie might have added.

Thursday, May 25, the Other Things

This isn’t a diary about space travel, I promise. But this was a big speech: President Kennedy announces, before a special joint session of Congress, his goal to put a man on the Moon before the end of the decade.

The Apollo programme has begun, which would delight this little boy all his life. You could jump forward to the Moon landing (see p. 65), but wait, I’ve not been born yet.

In fact the famous Moon speech occurred 18 months later, four days after my first birthday, in which JFK said: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

The bit I always find amusing is, And do the other things, as if there was a list of other things he thought, nah, this speech is good enough with the moon bit.

He was right of course.

Sunday, July 2, Bang

Another celebrity death: Ernest Hemingway, American writer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1899), committed suicide. Have you actually tried reading his masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea? It’s like Waiting for Godot, only with less action.

Sunday, August 6, Hero #3

Here, just because no one ever remembers his name – who was it that said history is only ever written by the victors?⁴ Vostok 2 fires Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov into space and he becomes the second human to orbit the Earth, and the first to be in outer space for more than one day. And lands successfully the following day.

Thursday, September 7, Cartoons

Tom and Jerry make a return with their first episode since 1958, Switchin’ Kitten. The new creator, Gene Deitch, makes 12 more Tom and Jerry episodes over the next twelve months.

Saturday, September 9, Ta Da

At 04:20 hrs (GMT) I am born. In Harrogate General Hospital, England. I am almost a month older than Meg Ryan and Nadia Comaneci.

Saturday, September 30, Politics, a Dirty Business, Funny Too

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is formed. Thankfully. At last.

Replacing the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC). Hurrah. What a difference a vowel makes. And everyone laughed at Monty Python’s Judean Popular People’s Front, in 1977.

Politics is bonkers. Or as my dad said, Show me a politician and I’ll show you a crook. It didn’t stop him from helping me when I decided to run for Parliament. Although I think, he thought I’d dodged a bullet when I came second on election night in 2005.

That wonderful scene from Life of Brian:

REG: Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the f*****g Judean People’s Front.

P.F.J.: Yeah…

JUDITH: Splitters.

FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People’s Front.

P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters…

LORETTA: And the People’s Front of Judea.

P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters…

REG: What?

LORETTA: The People’s Front of Judea. Splitters.

REG: We’re the People’s Front of Judea!

LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front?

REG: People’s Front! C-huh.

FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?

REG: He’s over there⁵.

Sunday, December 31, Wheezing Away

My First New Year’s Eve! How Exciting. Well, Hardly

Like all babies, on family photos I look just like every other baby; trussed up in a babygrow and swathed in woollen baby blankets on a feather pillow. And of course, the photos are in black and white, printed on matt paper and protected in a leatherette photo album.

Assuming the chill of a North Yorkshire winter was bad for my feeble asthmatic lungs, my mother kept me warm, indoors. I rarely saw the sun and had the skin to prove it. Meanwhile, my little lungs did their best not to inflate and my anxious parents were in an out of Leeds General Infirmary (faster than something very fast, angry clackers?). What was wrong? There was nothing wrong, with me.

The consultant blamed the weather.

So my parents resolved to leave grey Great Britain, on the cusp of exploding as the centre of the Swinging Sixties, and settled in civil war-ravaged Nigeria.

Into the sunlight and back a century. A great choice.

Turns out the wool and the goose feathers were making it hard for me to breath. A heaf test years later reveals I’m also allergic to grass pollen, horsehair, cat faeces, buttons, goose feathers and wool.

I know what you’re thinking. Just avoid cantering across a cricket pitch on a horse covered in cat shit? I’ve avoided it so far.

The buttons? I’ll explain, later.

But we’re jumping ahead. Asthma wasn’t a global thing until I was five, the year when England wins the Football World Cup on Saturday, July 30, 1966. The match was contested against West Germany, with England winning 4–2 after extra time to claim the Jules Rimet Trophy.

1962 Leeds, West Yorkshire, Northern England

Earth continues its journey through space at 1.3 million miles per hour, revolving around the Sun at 67,000 miles per hour and turning on its axis at 1,000 miles an hour approximately.

My second year on earth came and went.

Happy and smiling now, but moments later the terror of Manston Crescent as I plucked out all the feathers from Auntie Joan’s wedding hat. Well, who left it on the bed anyway whilst they were waiting for the wedding cars?

(Note the wallpaper – from a distance don’t those look like lungs, rather than

bugloss leaves?)

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¹ January 3 – Cuba: nuclear Armageddon is threatened, off the coast of Florida: US President Dwight D. Eisenhower announces that the USA has severed diplomatic and consular relations with Cuba (Cuba/US relations are restored in 2015).↩︎

² Watch with Mother was a cycle of children’s programmes created by Freda Lingstrom and Maria Bird. Broadcast from 1952 until 1975, it was the first BBC television series aimed specifically at pre-school children, a development of BBC radio’s equivalent Listen with Mother, which had begun two years earlier. In accordance with its intended target audience of pre-school children viewing with their mothers, Watch with Mother was initially broadcast between 3:45 pm and 4:00 pm, post-afternoon nap and before the older children came home from school. The choice of the title for the series was intended to deflect fears that television might become a nursemaid to children and encourage ‘bad mothering’. Trumpton’s fire brigade: Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, and Grubb is perhaps Trumpton’s most-recognised feature. Captain Flack’s roll call voiced by Brian Cant was recited in all but one episode: puppeteer Gordon Murray has explained that Pugh and Pugh are twins you must understand – not Hugh, Pugh.↩︎

³ American musician Prince Rogers Nelson (better known as Prince, aka Symbol for a mad few years) was born June 7, 1958 – died April 21, 2016. As a writer and performer, I think, he and Mozart would have been soul mates, mutually admiring the other’s talent. What I would pay for a gig to see them perform together. Especially as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Kate Bush and ACDC are the warm up acts…↩︎

⁴ Winston Churchill, apparently, paraphrasing Hermann Goering.↩︎

⁵ Back in the autumn of 1961, three wonderful artistic endeavours happen:

October 18 – West Side Story is released as a film in the United States.

October 19 – The first edition of Private Eye, the British satirical magazine, is published.

November 10 – Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is first published.↩︎

1963, Leeds. Harrogate, North Yorkshire,

Northern England

In 1963, the world stood still and remembered where it was – except me, I was only two years old – when they heard that John FitzGerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time in Dallas.

See also Grassy Knoll.

Also this year, Ndabaningi Sithole founded the Zimbabwe African National Union, a militant organisation that opposed the government of Rhodesia, in July 1963. A member of the Ndau ethnic group, he also worked as a Methodist minister. He spent 10 years in prison after the government banned ZANU. And my later ability to pronounce his name when I was at Malsis means that Mr Sithole is an early front-runner on my Names to Cherish list (see p. 75).

The Reverend Canaan Banana (and Cardinal Sin) also makes the Names to Cherish list, (ibid.). But for different reasons.⁶

1964, Harrogate

Quiet, again. Not much of note for me. Be fair, I am just three years old.

The boy who is waiting for something to turn up might start on his shirt sleeves.⁷

This is also a Winter Olympics year, (Innsbruck, Austria), and it follows a pattern through my life of being totally disinterested in anything performed in the cold or in ice and snow. Give me a beach holiday any day.

That said, Torvill and Dean, John Curry, Robin Cousins, Amy Williams, Lizzy Yarnold and of course Eddy the Eagle, do capture my imagination during their few weeks of fame.

Saturday, February 1, No 1

Just so, we’re keeping track of the Fab Four’s progress: The Beatles vault to the #1 spot on the US singles charts for the first time, with I Want to Hold Your Hand.

Saturday, April 25, Introducing: Leeds United

And if I wasn’t just three and a half years old, this would be my best news of the year.

PROMOTED! Leeds United football club win the 1963/64 Second Division title, thanks to the stewardship of manager Don Revie. Hold on to your scarves and rattles. It’s going to get exciting, for Leeds’ fans.

Meanwhile some other stuff happened in 1964.⁸

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⁶ Canaan Sodindo Banana (5 March 1936 – 10 November 2003) was a Zimbabwean Methodist minister, theologian, and politician who served as the first president of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 1987. He was Zimbabwe’s first head of state after the Lancaster House Agreement that led to the country’s independence. In 1997, Banana was arrested in Zimbabwe on charges of sodomy, following accusations made during the murder trial of his former bodyguard, Jefta Dube. Dube, a policeman, had shot dead Patrick Mashiri, an officer who had taunted him about being Banana’s homosexual wife. He split geddit to South Africa whilst released on bail before he could be imprisoned, apparently believing Mugabe was planning his death. He returned to Zimbabwe in December 1998, after a meeting with Nelson Mandela, who convinced him to face the ruling. Banana was sentenced to ten years in jail; nine years suspended, and was also defrocked. Banana died of cancer in 2003.

Cardinal Sin was also the 30th Roman Catholic Archbishop of Manila instrumental in the 1986 People Power Revolution, which toppled the regime of President Ferdinand Marcos and installed Corazon Aquino as his successor. He died peacefully on 21 June 2005 and is buried in the Philippines.↩︎

⁷ Attributed to Gareth Heinrichs.↩︎

⁸ February 25 – Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) beats Sonny Liston in Miami Beach, Florida, and is crowned the heavyweight champion of the world.

February 27 – The Italian government asks for help to keep the Leaning Tower of Pisa from toppling over.

March 15 – Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor marry (for the first time) in Montreal.

June 16 – Keith Bennett, 12, is abducted by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady in the north of England. His body has never been found.

June 19 – Boris Johnson born. See also 24 July 2019, becomes the prime minister of UK.

August 27 – Walt Disney’s Mary Poppin has its world premiere in Los Angeles. It will go on to win five Academy Awards, including a Best Actress for Julie Andrews. It is the first Disney film to be nominated for Best Picture.

October 10–24 – The 1964 Summer Olympics are held in Tokyo, Japan, the first in an Asian country.↩︎

1965, Harrogate

Saturday, January 30: Hats Off, Hats On

The cranes along the Thames all bowed in respect as the body of Britain’s most famous and surely favourite statesmen wended its way through London. My life has been peppered by Churchill aphorisms, quoted by teachers or friends. Possibly, the most notorious is his exchange with Bessie Braddock: Winston, you’re drunk!

Bessie, you’re ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober.

Often confused with his exchange to Nancy Astor: Winston, I were your wife I’d put poison in your coffee.

If I were your husband, I’d drink it.

This being the day of his funeral, these words ring true, and could only be his: I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is ready for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

The state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill was broadcast live on the BBC and seen around the world. It was the first state funeral of a politician in the century and the biggest national event since the Coronation of 1953. I have seen the footage of the ceremony so many times it’s etched in my mind. Could I have been there? Was I?

No. We lived in a small terraced house in Manston Crescent, Leeds.

My parents: Jerry Milner m. Mary Agnew, March 1961. He was a trainee bank clerk in London, making ends meet by 1965 for his young family by also cleaning buses at night to bring in some extra money, and at the weekends going on Territorial Army training with the Royal Parachute Regiment. Prior to meeting Mum, he had joined the regiment during his National Service. Unlucky for many, 1965 was the last year when National Service for all men aged 18 was scrapped, but it was one of the highlights of my father’s career. He qualified for the SAS and saw active service in Aden and Cyprus. Sometime in 1960, he contracted what was later diagnosed as malaria and woke up in the Royal Free Hospital, London, on the tropical diseases ward. In the care of Nurse Agnew. How he survived that is even more impressive than his prowess in hand-to-hand combat.

Mother: was a nurse (as above).

Incredibly, Dad recovered and asked Mary out.

It was a major dent in both their futures that their one night of passion resulted in my conception one January evening. They married in March 1961. With a baby on the way, the race was on to find a home, which they did eventually in Leeds where Auntie Joan, Mum’s spinster sister and 13 years her senior, was a health visitor and their mum, a housekeeper/cook. Another sister, Harriet, 12 years older than Mum, quickly escaped the Agnews and married quickly.

1

London, 1960: Another nurse in the family. This one is my scary Auntie Joan, who preceded my mother and cousin Julia who both trained and qualified at the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead.

Their mother Margaret had four names. Joan and Harriet called her ‘Mother’; my mother called her ‘Mummy’ and we children called her ‘Nana’.

Their father Arthur, deceased, 1961, had been for most of his life a professional observer of equine fitness and stamina.

Sadly for his family, his professional investments at the turf accountants and bookmakers rarely turned the hoped for profit and Margaret fought beak and claws during and for fifteen years after the war to ward off the bailiffs and keep her three girls in school uniforms, spam, dripping and corned beef.

Completing the character line up at this time was my favourite uncle. Uncle Desmond was a spectacular hypochondriac but also the kindest and gentlest person I ever met. And he loved me. Which was just as well because my young mother, she was only in her early twenties herself, found me a real handful.

Perhaps because she was insecure around me, I played up all the time, and when I wasn’t being naughty, I was being ill. At times, frightened out of my wits – and hers – as I struggled to breathe for no apparent reason, childhood asthmas in the 1960s were poorly understood and my wheezing seemed as fickle as my moods.

Harrogate 1961: A major dent in their futures. Mr and Mrs Milner, my parents.

Uncle Desmond (always Des) invariably behaved as if he had walked off a page of Jeeves and Wooster. By jingo’s, Heavens to Betsy, gosh, by George, and cripes were antiquated phrases even in Wodehouse’s day, but Des clung on. Similarly, he hung on to his rounded collars and floral ties long after kaftans and flares had come and made their exit on the British fashion scene.

He was great